Welcome to Beatles (and The Monkees, and The Who) week! I’m knocking out the 4 movies on this list that involve musical foursomes with bowl cuts. I didn’t intend on doing this – I was just going to watch Head and move on to #88; but I made the mistake of telling my mother I was going to be watching the Monkees movie, and I was filled with dread when she replied…
“I’m not sure if I saw that… I mean, I must have. It’s their response to that Beatles movie, right?”
“Which Beatles movie? Yellow Submarine?”
“No… Was it Hard Day’s Night? or Help!?”
“…I don’t know…”
“They didn’t like being compared to The Beatles, so they made their own movie, and it was weird.”
To my absolutely shit luck, both of those movies are on this list, and now I have to watch them first *for context*.
Growing up in a post-Beatles era is a strange thing. Everyone talks about how prolific they were to exist, but their early music sounds unremarkable to me. Perhaps it’s because their influence has already permeated every aspect of our culture, so it doesn’t sound new or exciting; it just exists like everything else does. This isn’t to imply I don’t like it – but I’m most likely not going to seek it out. We’ve got that jukebox musical, the crosswalk picture, “Imagine” has been meme’d to death because of the great Celebri-covid breakdown of 2020… Unless it’s “Blackbird” or their acid-dropping days, I’m generally uninterested.
Also, fun fact that I just discovered: The Beatles were only a band for 10 years, during the entirety of the 1960s. Seeing where they started and where they ended up, I guess Mad Men’s depiction how fucking weird of a trajectory that decade turned out to be was accurate.
A Hard Day’s Night doesn’t really have a plot, other than The Beatles are playing on a television show and take every opportunity in the moments before to shirk this responsibility and hit on girls. This movie is, instead, an excellent exercise in marketing. Its only redeeming factor is the charisma of the Beatles themselves, assuming you are someone who finds them charismatic. It displays how popular the boys are by showing women chasing and screaming at them constantly, it implies how successful they are by having them play on television and take off afterward in their own helicopter, and it showcases their really mediocre acting skills with a series of weird bits.
I think I’m too queer to appreciate this. Nothing about John fucking around in a bathtub does anything for me, or having the band make silly faces at the camera. Also, much like the “I’m too old for this” Disney movie barometer where you start to identify with the parents, I very much empathized with the manager for having to wrangle these horny 20-somethings.
Honestly, for being a device to introduce hijinks into the movie, Paul’s grandfather was the most entertaining bit. He constantly is haranguing the boys, manipulating people against each other, and running scams to get money. He literally takes the clothes off of a waiter so he can go gambling at an illicit club he chided Ringo for getting invited to moments earlier.
I also appreciated he prude-shamed Ringo until he leaves the band to wander around the city taking pictures of empty bottles, sadly eating sandwiches, and murdering birds with darts.
#foreveralone
When Ringo gets arrested for generally being lonely, I guess, he runs into Paul’s grandfather, who relays, in detail, the amount of police brutality they should be preparing themselves for, comparing the cops fists to matured hams. The man is a legend.
As for the music, it’s The Beatles, so if you like them, you’ll love this movie. They play on a train, on stage, they run around in a field to it – it’s everywhere. What I almost forgot to mention was the camera work, which made me want to blow chunks, especially on the train, holy shit. I get the train was moving, but jesus, there could have been something they could do? It’s 1964, it’s not like making movies was new. Also, I appreciate they’re the predecessors of playing electric instruments acoustically in music videos.
My favorite number was the one where they looked as bored playing it as I felt watching it.
“If I Fell” somehow weaseled its way right into my craw, as it is the worst Beatles song I’ve ever heard, with the most asinine lyrics. In the immortal words of Dream, “That was her, this is me.”
DON’T FORGET EVERYONE AGGRESSIVELY LOVES THE BEATLES!
This movie is #4 on the list. This beat out productions like Chicago, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Christ on a cracker.
Next is Help!, which I sorely need.
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